Montana Creeds: Logan

by Linda Lael Miller

  He was on the bedroom floor with a screwdriver, setting up the metal frame that would hold the mattress and box springs, when he heard voices out in the living room.

  Sidekick, a little slow on the uptake when it came to guard-dogging, rose to his haunches and gave a tentative bark.

  “Logan?”

  He recognized the voice. It was Josh, Briana’s older boy.

  “In here!” he called. “End of the hall, on the right!”

  Footsteps pounded along the wide corridor, and Josh and Alec appeared in the open doorway, flanked by Wanda.

  “Everything okay?” Logan asked. Given the time, their mother was probably working. Did these kids run loose all day, on their own, with only a fat old dog for protection?

  You did, said a voice in his mind.

  The reminder made him smile.

  “Sure,” Alec said. “We just came to visit, that’s all. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Logan replied. “It’s okay provided your mom doesn’t object.”

  The boys exchanged guilty glances.

  Logan decided to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “Did you come through the orchard?” he asked casually, concentrating on turning the last screw. Tonight, he’d be sleeping in his own comfortable bed. Things were looking up.

  “Nope,” Alec said helpfully. “Mom said there might be bears, or Cimarron might get loose and charge us, so we took the main road.”

  “Maybe you ought to call your mother at work. Let her know where you are.”

  “We’re not supposed to bother Mom unless one of us is bleeding or we smell smoke,” Josh said.

  “That’s reasonable,” Logan answered, getting to his feet. “Let’s go see how the new fence is coming along, then we’ll rustle up some lunch.”

  The boys looked delighted.

  Spotting his cell phone on the mantel as they entered the living room, which was piled with boxes from the freight truck, Logan snagged it and turned it on.

  Five messages—three from Dylan, two from Tyler.

  He smiled and slid the phone into his jeans pocket.

  Let them stew.

  “Mom says we’re going to have a cell phone when she either gets a raise or wins the lottery,” Alec said.

  “Hmm,” Logan said. Things must be pretty tight if Briana couldn’t afford a cell phone. Hell, even kindergarteners had them these days.

  “She’s not going to win the lottery, stupid,” Josh said, giving his brother a shoulder shove. “She doesn’t buy tickets.”

  “You called me a name,” Alec protested. “I’m telling.”

  Logan whistled through his teeth, a surefire attentiongetter.

  The boys stared at him in admiring surprise.

  “Chill, my brothers,” Logan said. Then he gestured toward the open front door. “Let’s go.”

  BRIANA FROWNED at the phone receiver before she hung up.

  Millie, on her break, sat on one of the couches thumbing through an old copy of People, but otherwise, they had the employees’ lounge to themselves.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Briana tried to ignore the incipient panic forming into a little whirlwind in the pit of her stomach. “I’ve called home three times since I got to work this morning,” she murmured. “Nobody answers the phone.”

  “Maybe Josh is on the Web,” Millie said. Most people had high-speed Internet connections, but Briana still used dial-up, and there was only one phone line in the house.

  “You’re probably right,” Briana admitted, wondering why she hadn’t thought of that perfectly obvious possibility.

  Because she’d thought of Logan Creed and practically nothing else since the night before, that was why. She’d tossed and turned and gone to the living room window twice, when she should have been sleeping, hoping to see the lights of his house gleaming through the trees.

  Still, she felt uneasy, and if she hadn’t already pushed the envelope by asking Jim for Saturday off, she’d have made a quick trip home, just to make sure nothing was wrong.

  And so many things could be wrong.

  The boys might have left the house, bored with chores and daytime TV and the computer, and gone to the orchard, figuring they could “grin down” any bear they might encounter.

  They might have gone to the pasture, to look at the bull.

  Or Vance might have come, knowing she’d be working, and stolen them. Granted, that one was a stretch, since stealing Alec and Josh would also involve feeding and clothing them, but stranger things had happened.

  Vance loved getting a rise out of her, and abducting her children would certainly do the trick.

  She folded her arms and bit down hard on her lower lip. Bills or no bills, she was getting a cell phone as soon as her shift ended.

  The yogurt Briana had gobbled down in her car on the way to work curdled and tried to climb into the back of her throat.

  “Bree?” Millie fretted. “You don’t look so good. Want me to ask Jim if you can go home sick?”

  Briana was sorely tempted, but in the final analysis, she couldn’t bring herself to lie to Jim, even indirectly. He’d promoted her twice and given her Saturday off, even though they were always shorthanded on the weekends. He didn’t deserve to be jerked around.

  She shook her head, drew a deep breath and headed back out onto the casino floor to pay out jackpots, make change and keep an eye out for trouble.

  She was near the front entrance, half listening to an old man insisting that the slot machines were rigged and half worrying that her sons were on their way to God knew where in Vance’s old van, when she spotted Logan coming into the nearby restaurant, through the “family entrance.”

  Alec and Josh were with him, both of them grinning cheerfully.

  The first thing Briana felt was relief. Her boys were safe, close enough to see and touch.

  The second thing was a slamming fury that shook her bones and then rushed through her bloodstream like venom.

  Who the hell did Logan Creed think he was, taking her children anywhere without her knowledge or permission?

  CHAPTER SIX

  “INCOMING,” JOSH intoned, peering over the top of his menu.

  Logan had already spotted Briana out of the corner of his eye, steaming toward them like a freight train on a downhill grade. He grinned a little, anticipating the inevitable collision, complete with sparks. “Think I’ll have the beef enchilada-tamale combo,” he said.

  Alec shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Mom looks pissed,” he whispered.

  “You’re not supposed to say ‘pissed,’” Josh told him.

  “Pissed,” Alec repeated, jutting out his chin. “Pissed, pissed, pissed.”

  Briana strode through the wide doorway in the long glass wall separating the Mexican restaurant from the rest of the casino.

  Logan calmly closed his menu.

  Stood.

  Briana glared at him, then, hands on her hips, turned to the boys, both of whom were cowering behind the giant menus, their eyes wide with both alarm and defiance.

  “What,” she began, “did I tell you about riding in cars with strangers?”

  “Logan isn’t a stranger,” Josh said. “He’s our neighbor.”

  A waitress approached, cautiously, hovering at a safe distance.

  “Join us for lunch?” Logan asked Briana.

  Color surged into her cheeks. She always looked good, but being mad gave her a fiery quality that made Logan want to take her to bed, ASAP.

  That would probably happen later, rather than sooner.

  If at all.

  “I’m working,” she said.

  “And that means you can’t eat?”

  Clearly flustered, she turned to her sons again. “You’re supposed to be at home,” she said. “You know the rules.”

  “We got lonesome,” Josh said.

  “It’s hard being a latchkey kid,” Alec added. He’d have a big future in any business involving manipulation by-bullshit, that one. Pr
obably make a good lawyer—or a politician.

  “So we went over to Logan’s place to see what he was doing,” Josh went on, as though Alec hadn’t spoken.

  “We stayed completely away from Cimarron and the orchard,” Alec added, his tone and expression earnest. “We took the county road.”

  Briana consulted her watch, the motion of her arm slight but jerky. She started to say something, then stopped herself. Sighed.

  “Guilt won’t work with me,” she told Alec, a little late.

  On the contrary, Logan thought, Alec’s latchkey remark had struck the bull’s-eye.

  She looked up into Logan’s face, and he saw pain in her eyes. Pain and fear and a kind of weariness that even a long vacation couldn’t cure. “I have to work,” she said.

  And Logan wanted to draw her into his arms, hold her. Tell her everything would be all right.

  He had no business doing any of those things, so he just stood there. “No harm done,” he said quietly. “When the boys showed up at my place, I figured the best thing I could do was bring them here. To you.”

  She let out her breath, and her stiff shoulders slackened a little. “Thanks,” she said, without much conviction. And then she looked at her watch again. “I’d better get back on the floor,” she said. Pride had replaced the pain in her eyes. “I don’t get off work until five.Alec and Josh can wait in the coffee shop until my shift is over.”

  Logan nodded, registering that she didn’t trust him to hang out with her children for the rest of the day, and reconciling himself to that. He was a stranger to her; caution was more than reasonable.

  “Can’t we go back to the ranch with Logan?” Josh asked. “It’s no fun sitting in a casino all day.”

  “I guess you should have thought of that,” Briana told her son, “before you broke rule number one—when I’m not home, you don’t go any farther than the yard.” A pause. “And where, pray tell, is Wanda?”

  Alec grinned broadly. “She’s home. We dropped her off before we came to town, but Sidekick is out in the truck. He’s even got a water dish.”

  “Can’t you just have lunch with us?” Josh’s voice held a pleading note.

  “I owe you a meal,” Logan said, referring to last night’s supper.

  But Briana just shook her head. Then, after fixing each of them with a warning glance—first Josh, then Alec, then Logan—she turned and went back to work.

  The boys were a little subdued after that, but they ordered the beef enchilada-tamale combo, as Logan did, and ate as if they’d been locked away someplace and starved for a week.

  They’d almost finished their lunch, and Logan was gearing up to leave the boys behind at the casino—a thing he would find hard to do—when he spotted Brett Turlow watching him from a table on the far side of the restaurant.

  Turlow immediately looked away.

  He was sitting alone, a smaller man than Logan remembered. In his midforties, old Brett wasn’t aging well. He’d evidently done some hard living since taking over the family logging business, running it into the ground and declaring bankruptcy.

  Logan knew all that because he’d kept up a subscription to the Stillwater Springs Courier after he left home the first time, and because he had several good reasons to dislike Brett Turlow.

  They went way back, he and Brett, though there was a decade’s difference in their ages.

  Way, way back.

  Logan paid the lunch check, left a tip for the waitress and walked Alec and Josh to the coffee shop to wait out the rest of Briana’s shift. Mindful of Sidekick out in the truck with a partially rolled-down window and a limited supply of water, Logan took the time to backtrack for a word with Brett.

  Somewhat to Logan’s surprise, Turlow was still sitting at his table, the remains of an order of nachos in front of him, along with a glass of beer.

  Turlow looked up at him, and the old mean streak coiled in his eyes. Back in the day, he’d been a hardass and a bully, the boss’s son. Now, his skin didn’t fit his face, but hung loose on his bones.

  He’d beaten the hell out of Logan once. And then Jake had beaten the hell—and then some—out of him.

  Turlow had wanted his dad to fire Jake, on the spot.

  But whatever else he might have been, Jake Creed was the best logger in the woods. He felled three trees to everybody else’s one, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. Not the giant pines they called widow-makers, because they had a way of splitting from tip to trunk and crushing any man setting chain somewhere along their length, and certainly not Deke Turlow’s son. Ever mindful of his profits, Deke had ordered Brett out of the woods instead of Jake.

  He hadn’t come back until after Deke turned a bulldozer over on himself and died, and even then, the old man’s will prevented him from getting rid of Jake. That must have been hard to swallow, working day after day with a man who’d kicked his ass in front of half of Stillwater Springs.

  “You come over here to gloat?” Brett asked wearily.

  “Now why would I want to do that?” Logan countered.

  “You know I lost the logging outfit. All that competition from overseas, and the environmentalists always making a fuss over some owl—”

  “Bad things happen,” Logan said. Like that chain snapping at the wrong time, he thought, and spilling a few tons of logs off the truck bed to crush Jake to a pulp.

  “You and your brothers got the insurance money,” Brett said, as though that made it all right, the way Jake had died. He’d been alive under all that timber when the other loggers got to him, according to the sheriff. The pain must have consumed him like a fire, but he’d laughed. He’d looked up at old Floyd Book, bloody as a chunk of raw hamburger, and laughed.

  “This is how it ends, old buddy,” he’d told Floyd. “This is how it ends.”

  They’d settled Jake’s personal debts with the insurance check, he and Dylan and Tyler, and divided what was left. Logan had used his to pay off the loans he’d taken out to go to college.

  “You were there that day, weren’t you, Brett?” Logan asked. “The day that logging chain broke?”

  Turlow squirmed a little, then pushed back his chair and stood.

  Logan stood a head taller, and he didn’t move to let the other man pass.

  “I was there,” Turlow said. “So what? So were the other eight men on the crew.”

  “They were still in the woods.”

  Turlow flushed a dull, sickly red. His breath smelled rancid, and he seemed to exude the sour stink of yesterday’s beer from every pore. “There was an investigation,” he spat. “I was cleared.”

  “He was sleeping with your girlfriend,” Logan said. “Jake, I mean.”

  Turlow’s flush deepened to dark crimson. “She was a tramp.”

  Logan shrugged one shoulder and stood solid as a totem pole. “Maybe so,” he allowed. “But it must have made you mad, just the same. Your girl, pounding a mattress with a man twice your age—”

  “Logan?”

  Distracted, he turned. Saw Sheriff Floyd Book standing behind him. Speak of the devil.

  Turlow skittered past him and beat feet for the outside door.

  “If I thought it would do a damn bit of good,” Book said, hooking his thumbs in his service belt, “I’d tell you to stay away from Brett Turlow for the sake of the peace.” Floyd had always had a belly—now it hung lower and strained the buttons on his brown uniform shirt. His badge was as shiny as ever, though, and when he took off his round-brimmed hat, Logan saw that he still had a thick head of iron-gray hair.

  “No worries, Sheriff,” Logan said. “I’ve said what I wanted to say.”

  “I don’t want any trouble around here,” Book went on, sounding tired to the marrow. “Things have been relatively calm in Stillwater Springs since your daddy was killed—God rest his obnoxious soul—and you and your brothers lit out for parts unknown. At the risk of sounding like a character in a corny black-and-white western, I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Log
an smiled. He’d always liked Floyd Book, thought he was a fair man. Now, though, he was mindful of Sidekick, alone in the truck. Brett Turlow probably wouldn’t bother his dog, but Logan didn’t want to take the chance. “I’ll mind my manners,” he said, starting to walk away.

  Book sat down at a nearby table, nodded a goodbye. “Stop by my office when you get the chance,” he said. “We’ll jaw awhile.”

  Logan nodded back and left.

  Out in the parking lot, Sidekick greeted him eagerly, sticking his nose through the opening in the window and barking in ecstatic welcome.

  Logan felt a rush of relief as he unlocked the truck, shouldered the dog back off the driver’s seat and climbed behind the wheel. He supposed running into Brett Turlow had been inevitable, given the size of Stillwater Springs, but the experience had nettled him, just the same. Brought back a lot of gut-grinding memories.

  He’d rushed back to Montana when word of his dad’s accident had reached him, and found Jake in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Missoula, veritably holding on to life by the tips of his fingers.

  There had been no part of Jake that wasn’t bruised a pinkish-purple. His legs and ribs had been smashed by the weight of those rolling logs, and the distortion was visible even under the blankets. Tubes and wires snaked from him in every direction—he’d seemed tangled in them, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.

  Only Jake’s eyes, fiercely blue and snapping with obstinate pride, had been the same.

  Jake hadn’t been able to talk—his voice box and virtually every bone and organ in his body had been broken or ruptured—but those eyes had said plenty.

  You’re too late.

  I’m disappointed in you. Always was.

  Yes, I’m going to die.

  Shake it off.

  “Shake it off,” Logan repeated aloud.

  Jake had kept his unspoken promise. He’d died before Dylan and Tyler could get there, and that was when the blaming had started. They’d both been furious with Logan for being in that hospital room when Jake breathed his last—maybe because it wouldn’t have seemed right to turn that fury on a dead man.